The Digital Divide:

National Broadband and Literacy

The Digital Divide

Obama: National Broadband Internet

21st Century Literacy?

Achieving Literacy

Dotorow: Digital Divide

Linear Version

"When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren't taught the language of sound and images, shouldn't they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?"

-George Lucas

Society has become increasingly more reliant on the Internet.  The Internet has become a necessity in our lives.  Individuals, business, educational institutions, and government agencies rely on the Internet for fast and effective means of communication and conducting business.  Although 72% of the population in America has access to the Internet, there are still so many rural and poor communities that lack broadband Internet access.   This tremendous digital divide in the U.S. will continue to grow unless further action is taken.

Promised by Obama, was the imminent need to allow every person in America access to free broadband internet, many scholars questioned the new users and their literacy of the Internet .[3]  Simply passing out technology is not going to close the gap.  It is more important to provide children with the skills and content to fully utilize the Internet.  In 2005, Sonia Livingstone, head of the department of Media and Communications at London school of economics, reported UK children’s experience online based on their prior experience with the Internet.  She concluded:

No longer are children and young people only or even mainly divided by those with or without access, through ‘access’ is a moving target in terms of speed, location, quality and support, and inequalities in access do persist.  Increasingly; children and young people are divided into those for whom the internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance. (p.12) [2]

 

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